The healing of Chiara Amirante’s eyes after prayer is inexplicable and lasting. She has even regained sight above the norm. The foundress of the New Horizons community tells, with an open heart, what happened to her in her new book on inner peace (La Pace Interiorein Italian.
A diagnosis with no possibility of recovery
Chiara Amirante was very young when she received the diagnosis from the ophthalmologist to whom her father had sent her. The doctor was clear and unequivocal: “The uveitis your daughter is suffering from is now chronic: it won’t heal … If there was no retinal involvement, the course of the illness might not be malignant. Otherwise, if fluoroangiography confirms the involvement of the retina in both eyes, the loss of vision will continue to be progressive until total blindness.”
Unfortunately, the report of the test he ordered confirmed his diagnosis.
Worse than a death sentence
The founder of New Horizons says, “Our greatest fear had become reality: the disease had affected the retina in both my eyes. As soon as I knew the result of the examination, I felt a blow like a sharp axe that cut into my heart, leaving me inwardly stunned. I felt worse than if I had received a death sentence”.
A steady decline towards blindness
No therapy could in any way “relieve the grip of pain that had become unbearable, and that progressive and rapid decline in vision, often accompanied by an unbearable sensation as of a dagger stuck in both eyes, would have blindness as its ineluctable outcome!”
The torture of injections
Chiara Amirante continues to describe the sufferings related to her degenerative eye disease: “I could’ve continued with the torture of frequent cortisone injections into my eyes, but with the knowledge that they were a palliative; they couldn’t cure me but only slow down a bit the progressive loss of my sight. So it was only a matter of time and then the light would go out.”
“Why such a terrible cross?”
At that point Chiara began to inwardly pray to God, “whom I had always felt was my Father, ‘Why!!! My God, why have you allowed this in my life? I can’t take it! It’s too much for me! I have always believed and testified to everyone that you are Love and love us immensely… How can you ask me to carry such a terrible cross, and for such a long time?’”
The prophetic words of the book of Isaiah
The founder of New Horizons felt herself plunged into a hellish abyss with no way out. She describes the key moment that followed:
I walked into the hospital chapel and, as I continued to struggle inwardly with growing rebellion, Mass began and someone read the first reading. Those words struck me like a bolt from the blue, an unexpected and beneficial balm for my spirit, an unexpected answer to my cry: “Be strong, do not fear! Here is your God! He himself will come to save you. Then the eyes of the blind will be opened” (Is 35:4-5).
God’s light enters her life
Those words made her think of the possibility of a miraculous healing of her eyes. Chiara Amirante explains:
[I had] the impression that God wanted to console me through those words! It was like a sudden light that brought some relief to my heart that until that moment seemed inconsolable. The disease continued to be particularly aggressive for months after that moment of grace, but that deep and inexplicable peace continued to accompany me throughout that painful ordeal.
Her eye disease disappears
Chiara was in constant dialogue with God. One night she told him that she wanted to help the poor and desperate people on the streets: she felt that this was her vocation. And the Lord responded with a prodigious event. The following morning Chiara woke up without eye pain: the uveitis seemed to have disappeared without explanation. When she went to the hospital for tests, the doctors were speechless. “My chronic uveitis (which for a good seven months had always worsened despite intense therapies) had suddenly disappeared.”
“No plausible explanation”
The doctor who had been treating her disease from the start told her, “Chiara, we have no plausible explanation for what happened to you. For those who don’t believe, it’s a mystery; for those who do believe, it’s a miracle. The fact is that your illness has incredibly disappeared!”
There was no trace of the disease in Chiara Amirante’s eyes anymore: the healing was complete, without explanation, and lasting.
“We immediately had my eyes checked,” Chiara continues in her book, “and—inconceivable but true—after losing eight tenths of my sight in just a few months, I suddenly had not only perfect eyesight but even better than normal!!!”
And today we celebrate...